For indie hackers

Social listening for indie hackers: skip the dashboards, find the askers

"Social listening" usually means enterprise software: dashboards of brand sentiment, share of voice, and reports for a marketing team. Those tools are built for companies that already have a brand people talk about. If you're an indie hacker with a product nobody has heard of yet, there is nothing to listen to — except the people describing the problem you solve.

That's the version of social listening that matters when you're small.

What indie hackers actually need

1. Intent, not mentions. You don't care that someone said "CRM". You care that someone wrote "I'm a solo consultant, is there a CRM that isn't a nightmare?".
2. A short list. You have a product to build. Ten good posts a week beats 300 alerts.
3. Sources where your buyers are. For developer tools and B2B SaaS, that's often Hacker News. For consumer niches it might be Discord or other forums.
4. Help replying. Writing a helpful, non-spammy reply is the hard part.
5. A price that makes sense pre-revenue.

The options, honestly

• • Manual search (free). X advanced search ("anyone recommend" <category> -filter:replies), hn.algolia.com. Works, takes time.
• • Keyword alerts (free–cheap). Email when a phrase appears. High recall, lots of noise — mentions, not buying intent.
• • Enterprise social listening (paid). Brand-sentiment dashboards built for companies that already have a brand people talk about. Overkill when you're still looking for the first ten customers.
• • AskCatcher (ours). Describe your product once; each week you get Hacker News and Stack Exchange posts where someone asks for a tool like yours, each with a suggested reply you post yourself. $19/mo Solo launch price (+VAT), $49/mo Multi-brand, 7-day free trial. X is coming soon.

What's the difference between social listening and intent monitoring?

Social listening tracks brand mentions and sentiment; intent monitoring looks for people actively asking for a solution. AskCatcher does intent monitoring.

What's a cheap social listening tool for indie hackers?

AskCatcher costs $19/month (launch price, +VAT) with a 7-day free trial and focuses on buying-intent posts on Hacker News and Stack Exchange rather than brand mentions. Keyword alert tools are enough if you only want every mention, including the noisy ones.

A 15-minute weekly routine

1. Open your digest (or saved searches) with coffee.
2. Pick the 2–3 posts where you can genuinely help.
3. Answer the question, then mention your product with a disclosure.
4. Log the thread in a sheet.
5. Once a week, look at which replies got responses or signups and adjust how you describe your product.

Rules that keep you from getting banned

• • Disclose that you're the maker every time.
• • Never reply with only a link.
• • Don't use multiple accounts or ask friends to upvote.
• • Respect each community's self-promotion rules.
• • If your product isn't a fit, say so — and recommend what is. People remember.

Why this works better than ads at the start

When someone asks for a tool in public, they've already done the hardest part of the funnel: they've admitted the problem and are actively looking. A helpful reply reaches them at that moment, costs nothing but time, and stays visible to everyone who finds the thread later through search — and increasingly through AI assistants that cite public discussions.

Is AskCatcher right for you?

Probably yes if your buyers are developers, founders, marketers or other tech-savvy people active on HN or X. Probably not yet if your audience lives mainly in private communities.

hello@askcatcher.com